In Dresden you have to have a particularly thick skin to be a local politician. Almost 90 percent of elected officials state that they have already experienced hostilities. This is followed directly by Erfurt and Munich. A study commissioned by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which is close to the green asked local politicians in major German cities whether they had already been confronted with hostilities and attacks in their offices.
According to the survey, this applies to 60 percent of elected officials throughout Germany. Most aggression occurs in face-to-face encounters. Hatred via social networks or by post is comparably frequent. Almost 11 percent of the cases involved property damage, and almost 10 percent involved physical attacks.
Some are considering quitting
Local politicians who identify themselves as belonging to a lower socioeconomic class (lower, working class or lower middle class) are particularly likely to say they have been harassed or attacked. In the survey, the same group also confirmed more often than average that they had changed their behavior as a result of hostilities, for example by avoiding certain topics or places.
With some officials, the hostilities go so far that they are considering withdrawing from politics. Almost five percent say so. Here, too, women, volunteers with a migration background and people from a low socio-economic class are disproportionately represented.
These results are alarming, says Andreas Blättle, political scientist at the University of Duisburg-Essen and co-author of the study. Against the background of how difficult it has now become to motivate people for democratic offices at the municipal level, this finding is “a serious obstacle”.
AfD members report the most threat experiences
In view of the results, Blättle calls for the protective structures to be strengthened. They would have to be tailored to different local situations. For example, different support offers are needed in cases of rape threats than in the case of punctured tires. “We also need law enforcement agencies well equipped to deal with charges.”
Among the political parties in the survey, members of the AfD report by far the most frequent experiences of threats. Blättle attributes this to a low tolerance towards the AfD in society as a whole. That raises the question “whether intolerant people should be tolerated in a democratic constitutional state.” However, the study also points to a possible distortion of the numbers: it is not unlikely that individual AfD members deliberately took part in the survey in order to draw attention to their subjective situation.